On October 25, 1850, only one month after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, John Knight and Willis Hughes traveled to Boston from Macon, Georgia to retrieve the escaped slaves, William and Ellen Craft. Upon arrival in the city, referred to by Civil War historian James McPherson as the “communications center for abolition,” Knight and Hughes were met with hostility and resistance, rather...

Preaching to his Philadelphia congregation, Reverend Dudley A. Tyng spoke out against the violent acts committed by Southerners in attempts to have Kansas admitted to the Union as a slave state. “The blood of a Senator has stained the floor of the Senate Chamber,” said Tyng in his June 29, 1856, sermon, and “the blood of her citizens has been poured out like water on the virgin soil of Kansas,...

At eleven o’clock on the morning following Christmas Day, 1862, General Braxton Bragg of the Confederate Army forced his Company E, 6th Kentucky Infantry Regiment (part of the commonly denoted “Orphan Brigade”) to stand round their fellow soldier, Asa Lewis, who awaited execution. Exactly one hour later the firing squad of twelve men carried out the young soldier’s sentence. As Lewis’ body,...

“You son of a bitch: If you ever send such papers here again, we will come and give you a good Lynching…” wrote the Lynch Club of Charleston, South Carolina, to newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison, “So you had better keep them at home.” This was one of two letters that Garrison published in his paper, The Liberator, on February 15, 1839, sarcastically titled, “Polite Letters from...

While angry Georgians voted in favor of secession in 1860, the small, sickly Georgia Congressman Alexander Stephens stood by and watched, helpless to avoid the crisis he had known was coming for years. During Georgia’s secession in November of 1860, Congressman Stephens spoke in firm opposition. Stephens, soon to be elected Vice President of the Confederacy, argued that Southern states should...

A bloody massacre of immigrants on route to California by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) and aided by local Native Americans occurred in Mountain Meadows, Utah. The blame for the massacre originally fell on the Native Americans. The Pittsfield Sun, a Massachusetts newspaper, provided an eyewitness account to the horrific crime and indicted the Mormons as the actual...

As the secession movement began, the Union focused on keeping the key Border states loyal to the nation if war occurred. Most crucial were Kentucky and Maryland, but worrisome was the fact that during the election of 1860, Maryland voted for John Breckinridge just as the Deep South had. Thus, many Unionists believed that Maryland contained large numbers of underground secessionists. One man within...

Harry T. Hays was the Brigadier General of the feared Louisiana Tigers. During the Civil War, the Tigers gained a reputation in the North as one of the fiercest Southern brigades. The Tigers are best known for their tremendous efforts at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where Hays said they, “advanced through the city of Gettysburg, clearing it of the enemy and taking prisoners at every turn.”
The...

The Opelousas massacre occurred in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, on September 28, 1868. It centered around Emerson Bentley, a white editor for a local newspaper called The Landry Progress and an influential schoolteacher who promoted the education of black children. Bentley wrote an article that local members of the Seymour Knights, a branch unit of the white supremacist group The Knights of the White...

Discussion of the Kansas Territory before the Civil War often turns directly to the time period known as “Bleeding Kansas,” which generally refers to the year of 1856 or to its part in the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. These events, however, were not what the citizens of the Kansas Territory were concerned with immediately before the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1860, with the rest of the country...